Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio

Mechanism-Based Thinking on Policy Diffusion. A Review of Current Approaches in Political Science

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has ended up in a diverse and often unconnected array of theoretical assumptions relying both on rational as well as constructivist reasoning – a circumstance calling for more theoretical coherence and consistency. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews and streamlines diffusion literature in political science. Diffusion mechanisms largely cluster around two causal arguments determining the desires and preferences of actors for choosing alternative policies. First, existing diffusion mechanisms accounts can be grouped according to the rationality for policy adoption, this means that government behavior is based on the instrumental considerations of actors or on constructivist arguments like norms and rule-driven actors. Second, diffusion mechanisms can either directly impact on the beliefs of actors or they might influence the structural conditions for decision-making. Following this logic, four basic diffusion mechanisms can be identified in mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: emulation, socialization, learning, and externalities.policy diffusion

Patterns of Power. The EU‘s External Steering Techniques at Work - The Case of Democratization Policies in Morocco

This paper conceptualizes a framework of political steering that includes modern conceptions of power as formulated by Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and others and applies it to the empirical analysis of the EU neighborhood policies. Analyzing the promotion of human rights and democracy as part of a comprehensive security strategy in Morocco since 2003, the authors scrutinize the use and the resonance of hierarchic, indirect and soft steering modes in EU external governance in the Southern Mediterranean. The findings suggest that Europe employs a complex strategy that targets governing officials, civil society actors and society at large, each with a respective mix of steering modes. Whereas classic incentives failed to initiate reforms at the government level, they proved effective in empowering Moroccan civil society actors. Soft modes are shown to play a decisive role in shaping the self-image of the administration officials vis-à-vis the EU and the parameters of public discourse on human rights and democracy, thus allowing for non-governmental actors to encroach on the government and demand democratic reforms. The integrated perspective on steering mechanisms in EU neighborhood policies thereby reveals the need to further explore micro-techniques of power in external governance analysis.power analysis; Mediterranean; Europeanization; Europeanization

State of the world’s cities 2012/2013

This report by the UN looks into the prosperity and the changing urban landscape of major cities all around the globe. As the world moves into the urban age, the dynamism and intense vitality of cities become even more prominent. A fresh future is taking shape, with urban areas around the world becoming not just the dominant form of habitat for humankind, but also the engine-rooms of human development as a whole. This ongoing evolution can be seen as yet another assertion, albeit on a larger scale, of the time-honoured role of cities as centres of prosperity. In the 21st as in much earlier centuries, people congregate in cities to realize aspirations and dreams, fulfil needs and turn ideas into realities. Prosperity in this broader, organic sense transcends narrow economic success to encompass a socially broadbased, balanced and resilient type of development that combines tangible and more intangible aspects. Taken in this multi-dimensional sense, urban prosperity tightens the links between individuals and society with their everyday environment, i.e., the city itself. Amidst multiple challenges facing cities today, a focus on poverty reduction and/or responses to the economic crisis is gradually shifting to a broader and more general understanding of the need to harness the transformative dynamics and potentials which, to varying degrees, characterize any city anywhere in the world

Proxy of democracy? : metaphors of connection as arguments against representation

This paper aims to assess the arguments that claim representative democracy may be enhanced or replaced by an updated electronic version. Focusing on the dimension of elections and electioneering as the core mechanism of representative democracy I will discuss: (1) the proximity argument used to claim the necessity of filling the gap between decision-makers and stakeholders; (2) the transparency argument, which claims to remove obstacles to the publicity of power; (3) the bottom-up argument, which calls for a new form of legitimacy that goes beyond classical mediation of parties or unions; (4) the public sphere argument, referred to the problem of hierarchical relation between voters and their representatives; (5) the disintermediation argument, used to describe the (supposed) new form of democracy following the massive use of ICTs. The first way of conceptualizing e-democracy as different from mainstream 20th century representative democracy regimes is to imagine it as a new form direct democracy: this conception is often underlying contemporary studies of e-voting. To avoid some of the ingenuousness of this conception of e-democracy, we should take a step back and consider a broader range of issues than mere gerrymandering around the electoral moment. Therefore I shall problematize the abovementioned approach by analyzing a wider range of problems connected to election and electioneering in their relation with ICTs

Multi-level legitimacy: conceptualizing legitimacy relationships between the EU and national democracies

This paper deals with the ways in which the interconnectedness of multiple political levels in increaingly internationalized structures of governance impacts on these levels' democratic legitimation. Focusing on the European Union (EU), it argues that in the EU's multi-level system, the legitimacy of the European level of governance is systematically influenced by the legitimacy of the EU Member States. Insights into such legitimacy relationships - and different logics of their construction - can be used to identify a number of distinct legitimation strategies for EU institutions, and to sketch some options of institutional design that might help to implement them. It is unclear, however, to what extent any kind of institutional design can actually affect the citizens' empirical legitimacy evaluations of the EU, since these are often characterized by a lack of information about the EU's institutional structure. --

Smartness. The face of the integration in the new “performing” society

Economia, potere, così come case, persone e lavoro, ma prima di ogni altra cosa città: tutto negli ultimi anni è chiamato a diventare “smart”. È questa l’era della smart economy, della smart governance, della smart home, delle smart people, dello smart work e della sempre più imperante smart city. Con il sostegno della scienza, o meglio delle diverse scienze (ingegneria, politologia, urbanistica, architettura, sociologia, etc.) che ne spieghino i fondamenti a monte e della politica che, ai vari livelli (nazionali e internazionali), ne orienti i processi a valle, la smartness diventa il nuovo orizzonte della società contemporanea a cui conformare senso e prassi su scala planetaria. Ma cosa significa, per un luogo come per una attività, per una persona come per una collettività, essere “smart”? Qual è il denominatore comune che lega tra loro le diverse declinazioni del termine, come gli ambiti di applicazione? Quanto questa ricerca di intelligenza è ricerca di efficienza? E quanto l’efficienza è di per sé garanzia di intelligenza? Dopo un breve excursus sul concetto in oggetto e suoi ambiti esplicativi, l’analisi si concentra sul postulato dell’integrazione quale principale condizione di realizzazione della smartness, anche per fini efficientisti. È l’integrazione la vera sfida contenuta nella smartness e la vera promessa, al momento non mantenuta, della società performante

Conceptualizing Democracy as Preparation for Teaching for Democracy

In this essay, a broad spectrum of the work of influential educational scholars was examined in order to identify crucial components of teaching for democracy. Synthesizing the literature with their experiences as middle level teachers and teacher educators, the authors determined those conceptions that would be most fruitful for moving in-service teachers to enact the more “muscular” concepts that foster civic participation and social justice. This collaboration resulted in the identification of four democratic practices as a foundation for designing a course on teaching for democracy. These included amplification of the voices of historically marginalized people, recognition that those in power must work to meet the needs of those without power, recognition of the advantages of diversity even at the potential expense of efficiency, and collaboration in order to teach for democracy

Conceptualizing Multifunctional Agriculture from a Global Perspective

The notion of multifunctional agriculture has been actively researched from diverse disciplines including economics, ecology, sociology, and geography since emerged out of the Uruguay Round in the 1990s. In particular, the economics approach represents an attempt to tailor the concept of multifunctional agriculture to market-oriented WTO trade regime. The economics approach has been fundamentally troubled by the lack of concord among WTO member countries on the question of what constitutes multifunctional agriculture. Upon examining how differently the notion of multifunctional agriculture is perceived across the US, the EU, the Cairns group, the LDCs, and the developed food-importing countries (the G10), this article theorizes that multifunctional agriculture connotes different contents in different countries/regions that are determined by their particular agricultural problems, which are in turn shaped by the cultural, ecological and economic characteristics unique to each country. The theorizing undertakes to overcome the Euro-centrism that has dictated the discourse of multifunctional agriculture since the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA). This article fills an important gap in the literature of social sciences concerning the concept of multifunctional agriculture by explicitly recognizing the wide diversity of contemporary agricultural problems across countries.multifunctional agriculture, global governance of agriculture, WTO, agricultural trade, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Shifting the focus? Moral panics as civilizing and decivilizing processes

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